A new Syrian opposition group is trying to resurrect the nonviolent tactics that the opposition used during the first few months of the rebellion last year, when demonstrations and calls for civic activism filled the squares of towns across Syria. But more important is who formed the group: Syrian Alawites.
Though Mitt Romney and President Obama painstakingly attempted to illuminate their differences throughout the third presidential debate, their respective commentaries on the rise of China revealed the similarities between the two candidates. Both candidates lamented the American jobs shipped to China and both lambasted the Chinese for supposedly defying the rules of the global economy.
The U.S. right wing appears to have a lock on conspiracy theories in the Obama era. But historically, such paranoid theorizing has been a bipartisan pastime. Has our dispossession from democracy blunted our ability to see reason?
Richard Armitage is at it again. George W. Bush’s deputy secretary of state has made a career of telling Japan what to do. When then-Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi had second thoughts about joining the “coalition of the willing” in Iraq, Armitage told an official, “Don’t try to back off.” Earlier, he had advised Japan (in Gavan McCormack’s paraphrase) to “pull its head out of the sand and make sure the Rising Sun flag was visible in the Afghanistan war.”
The announcement of America’s “Asia-Pacific pivot” by its first Hawaiia-born president was highly fitting, since the Hawaiian Islands are at the piko (“navel” in Hawaiian) of this vast region. A less flattering metaphor for Hawaii’s role in the Pacific is what Maui educator and native Hawaiian activist Kaleikoa Kaeo has called a giant octopus whose tentacles reach across the ocean clutching Japan, Okinawa, South Korea, Jeju island, Guam—and, at times, the Philippines, American Samoa, Wake Island, Bikini Atoll, and Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands.
The main geostrategic challenge facing Asia—as well as the U.S. presence there—has been the extraordinary rise of China in the past decade. In Obama and China’s Rise, Jeffrey Bader, a veteran diplomat of over 30 years, recounts his experiences working for Obama’s presidential campaign and serving as the senior director for East Asian affairs on Obama’s National Security Council from January 2009 to April 2011.
Mitt Romney’s comment about China in the first debate was no doubt intended to capitalize on American concerns about the U.S.-China economic relationship
The low rolling hills of the Dalateqi region of Inner Mongolia spread out gently behind a delightful painted farmhouse. Goats and cows graze peacefully on the surrounding fields. But walk due west just 100 meters from the farmhouse and you’ll confront a far less pastoral reality: endless waves of sand, absent any sign of life, that stretch as far as the eye can see.
When the first contingent of 250 U.S. Marines flew into Darwin last April, they were greeted on the tarmac with a personal handshake by Australian Defense Minister Stephen Smith and welcomed to the city by the Chief Minister of the Northern Territory (NT), Paul Henderson. When they left, there were no politicians to be seen.
The Obama administration’s “Pacific pivot” gives a prominent place for India, which came as a surprise to many observers. In his maiden visit to India in the first week of May, U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta piled on, calling defense cooperation with India “a linchpin in U.S. strategy” in Asia. But while India has largely opened its arms, Indian leaders are wary about being drawn into a Cold War with China.